NetHunter OnePlus 3T

Installing Nethunter on OnePlus 3T – 2020

I had an old OnePlus 3T kicking around and was bored one day and wanted to test out NetHunter. I was delighted to find that there was an official build of Nethunter for the OnePlus 3T. What I didn’t anticipate was the hell I would be facing with this project.

I’ll start off by saying this is a right pain to do. This took me many many attempts and resulted in soft bricks of the phone and a ton of errors when trying to install the nethunter packages. However I did get it to work eventually with trial and error.

Needless to say that there is a risk of a soft/hard brick of the phone and that all your data will be wiped following this process. It’s probably wise to take a backup of anything you need before undertaking these steps. I’m no expert in this so follow at your own discretion:

These are the steps I recorded:

Tools

Recover Phone From Soft Brick & Downgrade to Marshmallow

First you need to be on the correct version of Android which is Nougat. I found the easiest way to do this was to use the MSMDownload Tool to downgrade back to Marshmallow and then use the official upgrade method to flash the official OnePlus 3T Rom for Nougat onto the phone. I followed a brilliant YouTube guide on how to do this first time around and used this process many many times to recover from a soft brick:

  • Shutdown the phone
  • With the phone disconnected from the PC hold down the Volume Up Key for 10 seconds
  • Still holding the Volume Up Key connect the phone to the PC via a USB cable
  • The phone should then be recognised by the PC
  • Open up the MSMDownloadTool as administrator and click ‘start’
  • The process will take around 10 minutes to complete
  • Once complete boot the phone and set up the phone as usual

Upgrade To Nougat

  • Copy the OnePlus3TOxygen_28_OTA_057_all_1710122300_999cae4915b14f14.zip phone to the phone’s storage
  • Restore the official OnePlus 3T Nougat image though the local update method
  • Once restored boot into the phone and set up again.
  • You should now be on Nougat (Android 7)

Unlock The Bootloader

Unlock the bootloader as per the usual instructions

  • Enable developer mode
  • In developer mode:
    • Enable OEM unlocking
    • Enable advanced reboot
  • Reboot to Bootloader
  • Connect the phone to the PC and using fastboot.exe from Android SDK Slim kit type the following:
    • fastboot.exe oem unlock
  • Scroll to”Yes” with the volume keys and select the option using the power key
  • Once restored boot into the phone and set up

Flash The Recovery

This is the tricky part as the OnePlus phone seems to encrypt itself on setup, making it difficult to install the bootloader onto the phone. We’ll have to delete the userdata and cache partition from the phone:

  • Enable developer mode
  • In developer mode:
    • Enabled advanced reboot
  • Reboot to bootloader
  • Connect the phone to the PC and using fastboot.exe from Android SDK Slim kit type the following to remove the encryption:
    • fastboot.exe format userdata
    • fastboot.exe format cache
    • fastboot.exe reboot
  • Catch the phone before the reboot happens by using the volume up and down keys and go back into the bootloader. DON’T LET IT BOOT FULLY OR IT WILL ENCRYPT ITSELF AGAIN
  • At the bootloader and while the phone is connected to the machine run the following command to flash the recovery image onto the phone
    • fastboot.exe flash recovery twrp.img (3.0.4-1)
  • Once typed use the Volume up and Down keys to enter Recovery mode
  • Advanced -> Reboot -> System -> Swipe to install twrp
  • Let the phone boot up, set up and ensure TWRP is installed

Installing NetHunter

Onced the phone has booted up you should see a notification informing you that TWRP has now been installed. This is the tricky part over with, now we just need to install NetHunter:

  • Reboot into recovery mode
  • (Optional) – Make a backup using TWRP
  • Transfer to the phone the following zip files while in TWRP:
    • kernel-nethunter-oneplus3T-oos-nougat-2019.03-13-0514.zip
    • nethunter-generic-arm64-kalifs-full-with-su-20181019_064359.zip
  • Install kernel-nethunter-oneplus3T-oos-nougat-2019.03-13-0514.zip
  • Install nethunter-generic-arm64-kalifs-full-with-su-20181019_064359.zip
  • Reboot the phone

It might take a few reboots but once booted NetHunter should now be installed on your phone!